Dark energy and fat gravitons

Fat gravity particle gives clues to dark energy 

As explained at the link, one possible explanation of  dark energy would be if gravitons had a tiny, tiny mass.

(Is it just me, or does Nature News seem to be going a bit "New Scientist" in its reporting of some rather speculative theories?  Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

Another from the "Only in Japan" file

Can this cuddly mascot soften Japan prison image? | GulfNews.com

How does Japan help people feel better about a prison in the neighbourhood?  By making a mascot, of course:



Heh.

Storing energy works for solar, not so much for wind

Scientists calculate the energy required to store wind and solar power on the grid

A bit of a complicated study looking at the issue of storing energy from renewables.

It seems that with wind power, there is not much point in trying to store its energy when there is excess available, but that's not the case for solar.  

The real losers under an Abbott government...

...could well be the right wing schlock jocks who presumably have much less to get their dander up now that the world has been put to rights by a Coalition government.  (Sarcasm, of course.)

Even worse could be the fate of Michael Smith, who entertains himself and a clutch of wingnut types by playing amateur sleuth to what Julia Gillard did in her law office 20 years ago.  He'll probably spend the next 6 months trying to get the Abbott government to call a judicial enquiry into it; but if Abbott has any sense (yes, I know, a dubious proposition) he'll avoid the appearance of a vindictive witch hunt that no one sensible has reason to care about and reject the call.   Then, if  no police charges appear against Gillard (which is what I have always thought the likely outcome, given the shocking reputation of the main witness against her), what is Smith going to blog about?

For that matter, Andrew Bolt is going to have a harder time working himself into a frenzy, isn't he, when his favourite Labor targets are gone from the leadership and government?   I think I read somewhere that Insiders thrashed Bolt Report in the ratings in the election run up, but I can't find that story now.  Good to see that people know where to go for serious political coverage, anyway.

And the same general thing goes for all the radio right wing talk back.  Sure, the repeal or not of the carbon tax will keep them going for a while, but not for 3 years.

Odd but interesting

I wish the author hadn't given it a silly title, but this explanation of new (and previous) research on testosterone, testicle size and parenting (and male behaviour generally) makes for interesting reading.

Here's the quote

Lenore Taylor referred to this last night on Q&A, but I see that Michelle Grattan had already quoted it on line:

In all Abbott’s talk about the mandate he will have, it is worth noting his own view in other circumstances. He wrote after the Howard government’s 2007 defeat: “[Opposition leader Brendan] Nelson is right to resist the intellectual bullying inherent in talk of ‘mandates’. What exactly is Rudd’s mandate anyway: to be an economic conservative or an old-fashioned Christian socialist? The elected opposition is no less entitled than the elected government to exercise judgement and to try to keep its election commitments.”

Thanks for explaining that to us, Tony!

I trust the new Labor leader will quote that back at the government frequently with respect to carbon pricing.

The other matter which will make the debate interesting will be the IPCC report due out very soon.  It is expected to be strong, and should make the Labor and Green's position on carbon pricing appear more principled than ever.

If Labor had any sense, they would also be lining up economists to talk about how the "direct action" plan cannot plausibly reach its targets at the set cost Abbott has committed himself to.

I also note this from the LDP's website:  after a lot of dumb skeptic talk about how AGW isn't yet proved, it ends with:

Should the evidence become compelling that global warming is due to human activity, that such global warming is likely to have significantly negative consequences for human existence, and that changes in human activity could realistically reverse those consequences, the LDP would favour market-based options.

I doubt that a libertarian Senator will ever change on this - but if their website is to be believed, they may prefer carbon pricing to "direct action".

Nice graphic

Arctic sea ice delusions strike the Mail on Sunday and Telegraph | Dana Nuccitelli | Environment | theguardian.com

The Arctic Sea Ice extent minimum, which is only a short time off, is going to be much higher than last year's record, but as noted in the above article:

As University of Reading climate scientist Ed Hawkins noted last year,

"Around 80% of the ~100 scientists at the Bjerknes [Arctic climate science] conference thought that there would be MORE Arctic sea-ice in 2013, compared to 2012."

The reason so many climate scientists predicted more ice this year than last is quite simple. There's a principle in statistics known as "regression toward the mean," which is the phenomenon that if an extreme value of a variable is observed, the next measurement will generally be less extreme. In other words, we should not often expect to observe records in consecutive years. 2012 shattered the previous record low sea ice extent; hence 'regression towards the mean' told us that 2013 would likely have a higher minimum extent.

And this is nicely illustrated by this lovely gif, which I don't think I have seen before:

Uncle Rupert's election thoughts

My imagined thoughts seem likely to be accurate, given the way he tweeted recently:

He must have really enjoyed the IPA dinner a couple of months ago.   No wonder The Australian has become the Official Journal of the IPA and its pet blog Catallaxy.

Not bad, Jack

I've been looking through some of the comments at John Quiggin's blog, and note that Jack Strocchi's seems pretty reasonable.  I'll extract two bits from it:

The sixth point to make is that there is a paradox at the heart of the AUS polity: the public appear to despise the Centre-Left’s psephologically whilst broadly agreeing with the Centre-Left ideologically. Thus the Centre-Left has been wiped out at both state and federal levels, yet there is no great public enthusiasm for austerity or Hewson “Fightback” program. This is demonstrated by Abbott’s Big Government me-tooism on the subjects of Gonski education, national disability and some kind of national broadband program. He is also reluctant to revisit industrial relations, a traditional favorite of the L/NP Right.  ...

The tenth and final point to make is that the ALP did not really deserve to lose this election. going by the its performance, politicians and policies. Its economic administration was competent, there were no appalling ministerial scandals (apart from leadership tussles which were finally settled), its headline policies were broadly popular. At some basic level the electorate has made a bad decision – especially given that revoking the carbon and mineral taxes will empower the oligarchy. I draw this conclusion reluctantly as I am a fervent populist. I can only hope that the electorate comes to their senses in due course. In the meantime the ALP must work overtime to make themselves fit for government, as they did after the 1975-77 disasters.

Everyone's a winner, baby*

I didn't see all of the election coverage last night:  we were having a meal at an Italian restaurant where the family next to us had a few kids who probably had a combined count of 5 vomits during their stay, with the last one being particularly spectacular.  (The youngest toddler would vomit, then cause the older kids to get sick in sympathy.  I felt sorry for the parents, but nonetheless was happy to see them leave...)

Anyhow, I was home in time to see the Rudd "victory in defeat" speech, which did go on a bit, to put it mildly; and caused tension by making Labor sympathizing viewers wonder if he was ever going to get around to saying he wouldn't lead the party in Opposition.

The Abbott speech was pretty lame, I thought, and the optics of  it most noteworthy for the way in which it seemed that election victory was finally deemed good enough reason for the jettison of his barnacle-like daughters.  (And yes, one was still dressed like Sporty Spice.  Odd.)  From the ABC coverage, the family started heading up the stairs to the stage to join him at the end, only to find he had already descended into the crowd.   Good on ya, Tone, way to keep a look out for what's going on with the family.   I assume the young guy who then gatecrashed the family together on stage happened later - it didn't appear on the ABC.

One good thing about this election result is that I don't think anyone can plausibly claim to be puzzled by it - there really should be a lot less of this journalistic guff about Party X having lost its way and having to have a 12 month period of navel gazing to work out what went wrong  (which happens now whenever Party X loses an election.)   We all know exactly what went wrong - basically, Kevin Rudd and the fractious internal politics of the last 4 years.

At about 34% of the primary vote, this is low for Labor, but who doesn't just mentally tack on the Greens to get a true picture of combined Left leaning vote?  At 8.5%, the Greens are no doubt suffering from the replacement of the cheerful Bob Brown with a woman who naturally looks and sounds perpetually unhappy.   But the combined 42.2% is not that far from the combined Coalition vote which looks like 45.3%. (As to where to position the Palmer vote - God knows.  I suspect it is just a generic protest vote against politics, and neither side can take much comfort from it.)

It was therefore hard to be depressed with the result, because there was the feeling that everyone could claim to be a winner, in one way or another:

#  There were enough seats in Western Sydney and Queensland saved for Rudd to plausibly argue he had helped the party after all.
#  Julia Gillard was gracious in the off stage support for Labor, and her "captain's pick" of Nova Peris worked out after all.
#  The Labor Party won by Kevin giving up the leadership.
#  Mad Clive gets to create what will probably be some wildly unpredictable and theatrical political stories for the next couple of years at least before he has some physical or mental breakdown.

And of course, Tony Abbott gets to hesitate his way on national TV as PM instead of mere Opposition Leader.   For the reasons I have been outlining for years, I don't expect he will do well, and he and his Party have faked their way into government.   We now get to see if my Peter Principle diagnosis of him gets to be confirmed from the loftier position of PM.  (Regardless of what the public thinks, it's already been confirmed to my satisfaction.)

As for my feeling on the Labor leadership - Bill Shorten performed well on his television appearances during the campaign, I thought.  Before that, over the last year or two, I felt he has often seemed too stressed and grumpy, but his professional and personal life has been unusually difficult over the same period.   I still think he is the most appealing of the possible candidates.

* families, particularly those on low income receiving top up superannuation and assistance with school expenses excepted, of course.  As well as those who rely on penalty rates, public servants in Canberra, companies that wanted to decide on long term electricity investments within the next 12 months, car manufacturers and their employees, genuine refugees hoping for family reunion, environmentalists, etc.   Apart from those, the future's looking fine and dandy.
 

Pre-election post election commentary

The polls certainly look bad for Labor.  Or should I say, for Kevin Rudd, given the almost presidential style of this campaign.

On the up side:  the broader Australian public have finally joined me in disdain for Rudd as a politician.  Took them long enough:  I was there in 2006.

On the downside:  seems a fair few people over 35 have started to sort of like Tony Abbott.  I refer to the age factor in this because it seems there is hardly an under 30 year old in the land who he doesn't creep out.  As with Rudd, I predict his popularity, even with the dag demographic, will be but a fleeting thing.  There is every reason to believe he will not keep spending promises, will have some trouble on the international stage (I don't expect him to go over a treat in Indonesia especially),  and even (I've been reading around) have some early ministerial scandals.   Some people have said we may be looking at something like the Fraser government after Whitlam, and there might be something in that, but I expect Abbott to be worse.

There is much speculation going on about how the Senate might pan out.  The arcane system there seems to make it impossible to predict these days.  Last night on the ABC there was talk that the balance of power might be with three odd bods:  the creepy Victorian Senator John Lithgow John Madigan; Bob Katter mate, country and western singer James Blundell, and Nick Xenophon.  (I don't really know what to make of Xenophon - he certainly came across as an unsually lonely character on his appearance on Kitchen Cabinet earlier this year.) 

What a worry.

I'm going to be voting below the line to try to ensure as limited accidental preferences as I can.

 

For those who want to go prepared

senate.io — Australian senate below the line ballot paper tool

This looks like a handy tool.  Instead of pondering for 20 minutes in the local school hall (if it's a nice one, it was probably built by Labor, by the way) whether to put the Legalise Marijuana Party above or below the Climate Idiots Party, you can work it all out at home and print out your personal "how to vote under the line" card.

Neat.

Waste of cyberspace

My.  What a home for aging, bloviating, wannabe culture war warriors  Catallaxy has become.
(Have a look at this comment by someone about foreign aid cutbacks, too.  I won't even link to the comment about all males over 12 in Syria should be killed.) 

Keeps all the wingnuts in one location, though, so it serves a purpose, I guess.

The Coalition and research

Futile research or stealthy censorship?

Ian Musgrave puts the boot into the Coalition's populist stab at research funding yesterday:

Yes, that’s a good idea. We could set up a committee of experts to examine all grants in detail, and get them checked by external experts as well, before deciding on who to give money to.

Oh wait a second, we do that already, it’s called the Australian Research Council.

Now, I’ve been both an applicant and a reviewer of ARC grants, so I can tell you personally that the grant process is no cake run. The competition is fierce and the amount of grant money available is limited. The review process is exhaustive and more than a little harrowing. Only around 20% of all grants get funded, and you have to be exceptionally good for your grant to get up.

 But this part is most telling:

Great, now we have a bunch of auditors telling researchers what their priorities should be, that’s going to work out just fine. Not to mention the cost of having this team doing the re-prioritising. Anyone willing to bet that the amount of money saved by shuffling around grants with funny names that politicians don’t understand will be more than gobbled up by the Commission of Audit team?

Oh, and the funds clawed back from these “wasteful” projects to will be put into “new medical research programs for dementia, diabetes and tropical disease”. Yeah, except that isn’t the ARC’s role at all, that’s a completely different funding body, the National Health and Medical Research Council or the NH&MRC.
I suppose it would be too much to expect that the Coalition would actually understand how research is funded in Australia.

This is hard to see as anything other a cynical attempt to defund topics the Coalition doesn’t like.

 It reminds me of the Howard government's poor judgement in stopping small funding for Australian contribution to dangerous asteroid hunting.

I am curious (yellow)

What scientists can see in your pee

Quite a lot, as it turns out, and it's all on line now: 

"Urine is an incredibly complex biofluid. We had no idea there could be so many different compounds going into our toilets," noted David Wishart, the senior scientist on the project.

Wishart's research team used state-of-the-art analytical chemistry techniques including nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, gas chromatography, mass spectrometry and liquid chromatography to systematically identify and quantify hundreds of compounds from a wide range of human urine samples.

To help supplement their experimental results, they also used computer-based data mining techniques to scour more than 100 years of published scientific literature about human urine. This chemical inventory—which includes chemical names, synonyms, descriptions, structures, concentrations and disease associations for thousands of urinary metabolites—is housed in a freely available database called the Urine Metabolome Database, or UMDB. The UMDB is a worldwide reference resource to facilitate clinical, drug and environmental urinalysis. The UMDB is maintained by The Metabolomics Innovation Centre, Canada's national metabolomics core facility.

Looking back at the history of improving health

Life expectancy history: Public health and medical advances that lead to long lives. - Slate Magazine

It looks like this is the start of a series of posts about this fascinating topic.  Some of the things mentioned you would have heard before, but it's always interested to see snippets of information showing how the popular imagination about something is really quite inaccurate.  Like this:

One of the best tours of how people died in the past is The Deadly Truth: A History of Disease in America by Gerald Grob. It’s a great antidote to all the heroic pioneer narratives you learned in elementary school history class, and it makes the Little House on the Prairie books seem delusional in retrospect. Pioneers traveling west in wagon trains had barely enough food, and much of it spoiled; their water came from stagnant, larvae-infested ponds. They died in droves of dysentery. Did you ever play with Lincoln logs or dream about living in a log cabin? What a fun fort for grown-ups, right? Wrong. The poorly sealed, damp, unventilated houses were teeming with mosquitoes and vermin. Because of settlement patterns along waterways and the way people cleared the land, some of the most notorious places for malaria in the mid-1800s were Ohio and Michigan. Everybody in the Midwest had the ague!

Jericho as with Pascoe

Coalition costings: we finally get them and they're just political fluff | Business | theguardian.com

Greg Jericho makes a very similar assessment to Michael Pascoe's about the Coalition's costings:

Six billion dollars over four years. Or, given the total revenue over that time will be about $1,657bn, that’s about 0.36% of the budget over those years. Not a lot of room for error.

But they were about attacking waste. There was oodles of it, don’t you know. So how did they end up $6bn better off?

Well, today Joe Hockey and Andrew Robb, in a laughable 22-minute press conference, announced they will be cutting the growth of the foreign aid budget by $4.5bn, rephasing the water buyback scheme from over four years to over six years (a saving of $650m over four years) and a further 0.25% efficiency dividend for the public service to get $428m.

Those three measures account for 92% of the improvement of the Liberal party’s budget bottom line.

Talk about taking the tough choices. Cutting the growth in foreign aid. Who knew that was the biggest waste in government spending!

As Jericho then points out, the ridiculous thing is that Abbott is also trying to straddle the fence of whether or not the "commission of audit" will mean further cuts.

It's all pretty ludicrous.

Update:  by the way, surely the re-assigning of rail money to road construction indicates a pretty ad hoc approach to working out which infrastructure project is most beneficial?  I have complained about this a few times recently - everyone's saying it's important to put money into the "right" form of infrastructure, but making a trip to work, say, 15 minutes faster would seem something pretty hard to assess for its economic consequences.  

Update 2:  John Quiggin sounds the warning about the "commission of audit".

Pretty accurate, Waleed

Abbott's adoptive strategy on policy

Waleed Aly goes through the remarkable list of Labor policies and initiatives which the Coalition has come to endorse.  He concludes:  

 All this is a testament to the brutal efficiency of Abbott's opposition. He's quite prepared to bludgeon the government with an argument he later rejects. It's shameless, but it works because he does it with confidence and a straight face.

As I have been saying, it is also very similar to what Rudd did in  2007.  He picked up on one or two things the public did want changed (Workchoices in particular, but also - and people forget this - closing the "Pacific Solution") but overall he just ran a populist campaign as the softer, kinder John Howard. 

Tony Abbott would not admit this, but he has, on the face of it, turned out to be running as the stable Labor Party.  (His one distinguishing populist, and more wildly wrong headed than Rudd on Workchoices, policy is on carbon pricing.)

In both cases, it's the shamelessness of the approach that leads me to not respect it.  If they are going to ultimately support a policy, do so during the term of Parliament, not at the last minute.

And with Abbott, with his completely opportunistic, uninterested and unprincipled  approach to climate change, I could never vote for him.

Kevin's turn

Kevin Rudd with Annabel Crabb tonight was clearly more relaxed and comfortable than "Hah.Hah.Hah" Abbott, especially in the first half of the show.   There's no doubt that, despite his terrible reputation for being a difficult boss, he is close to his family, and there is no reason to question his assessment that he considers them his closest friends.   His daughter seemed, quite frankly, smarter than the Abbott daughters. (For one thing, she doesn't dress like Sporty Spice all the time, like one of Tony's daughter does, where ever she is.*)  And he has a nice dog: seeing him interact with it was definitely a humanising touch.     

But in the "one on one" with Crabb, there were plenty of flashes of the old fakery and over calculation in answers, and there is every reason to suspect he would still be a boss capable of making people very, very nervous.  It strains credulity to believe that he is felt worse about losing his 1996 campaign to become an MP than he did about the 2010 loss of leadership.  (Then again, maybe he was spectacularly emotionally immature in 1996, and had improved in that regard by 2010.  Who knows - he's a very hard man to judge on his self-reportage of his emotional state.)

I think he is obviously significantly smarter than Abbott, and can judge better who to take advice from.  On the other hand, it would seem his problem has always been over confidence in his own abilities, and it is very difficult to know how much more carefully he would listen to advice before making decisions if he were to be PM again.  He certainly failed to give a good impression of change  in the way he came up with what appeared to be (even if they weren't) ad hoc ideas in the course of the campaign.   I really think it was the way he announced these, without any explanation of how they had been decided upon, which started his leakage in the polls. 

But tonight, overall, he came out better than I expected.  I particularly liked his daughter's story about there being a good chance he would be sitting up reading a book at 4 am she arrived home as a teenager: it confirmed his nerdiness, but also made him seem a bit more human.    I think he probably would be a better PM this time around (in the unlikely event he wins government) as a result of his time on the backbench.  Keeping in check the old urge to make decisions quickly on the assumption that he is the smartest person in the room may be his burden for the rest of his life, though.

*  Too bitchy?  :)

The Joke

A pretty devastating assessment by Michael Pascoe of "Hockeynomics":

Remember all the times shadow treasurer Joe Hockey furrowed his brow, shook his jowls and growled that Australia had a budget crisis? Turns out he was only joking.

Either that or his “costings” disclosure is a joke. Or both.

After all the huffing and puffing, Hockeynomics is only proposing a $6 billion improvement in the budget’s cash bottom line over four years. In light of the past four years of hyperbolic fiscal posturing, this is genuinely astounding.
 
Even if you take year three and four budget projections seriously (and you really can’t, as everyone should now know), that works out to be an average improvement of $1.5 billion a year on a $400 billion budget – all of 0.375 per cent. It’s not even a rounding error. A half-decent Queensland storm can blow that away in half an hour.

By way of comparison, Tony Abbott is blowing $1.8 billion on reviving the novated lease/FBT tax lurk enjoyed by a minority of new car buyers, let alone an even smaller minority of voters. Consider the massive percentage increase in the Coalition’s budget improvement goal that could be obtained by implementing just this one tax policy based on principle and equity instead of subsidising a few salary packaging firms. Hey Joe, do the math.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/business/the-economy/hockey-closes-campaign-with-a-joke-20130905-2t7ab.html#ixzz2dzkZVqdk